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Saturday, February 24, 2018

`Amused, Amazed, or Excited'

“He is a
forgotten figure today, but he actually made his meager living on poetry. Bill
wrote for the non-academic reader of poetry. He covered the subject for SaturdayReview and did a whole series of popular anthologies, mostly of
comic verse. I own at least half a dozen of those collections, all used, which
I picked up in different places over the years. What the books all have in common
is that they had more or less been read to pieces by their previous owners.”

Which is the
truest critical accolade. Readers, common and otherwise, are the ultimate
critics. Sadly, the “non-academic reader of poetry” is an endangered species. I
know of seven. Dana added:

“Bill’s
other specialty was the short poem--ten lines and under. I have never found a book
he edited which I haven’t read in toto
with pleasure, which is more than I can say for Helen Vendler or Harold Bloom
who seem under the sway of the goddess Dullness. Bill read voraciously, and he
was often the first person to champion poets who otherwise would not have been
noticed.”

From the
library I borrowed Eight Lines and Under:
An Anthology of Short, Short Poems, an anthology Cole edited for Macmillan
in 1967. In his introduction, Cole credits an unlikely trio of poets with
suggesting such a collection: George Barker, Leonard Cohen and J.V. Cunningham.
All had chosen poems of four to six lines to include in an earlier anthology, Poet’s Choice. “This set me to thinking
about the beauty of brevity, and, with no ulterior anthologistic purpose, I
began copying attractive short poems and stuffing them in a filed. Thus, over
five years, this anthology accreted.”

I’m
sympathetic to Cole’s criteria. Poets can be at least as gaseous as
politicians. If your name is not Homer, Virgil or Dante, think twice about trying
to write a long poem. The twentieth century is littered with botched attempts. Cole
includes four poems by the famously laconic Cunningham, none longer than six
lines, and two of two lines, including one of his best:

“This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained

Grew so
broad-minded he was scatter-brained.”

Cole’s taste
is often good. He includes “Exeunt” by Richard Wilbur:

“Piecemeal the summer
dies;

At the
field's edge a daisy lives alone;

A
last shawl of burning lies

On
a gray field-stone.

“All cries are thin and
terse;

The field
has droned the summer's final mass;

A
cricket like a dwindled hearse

Crawls
from the dry grass.”

Cole
includes one of his own poems, “Time Piece,” a witty meditation on human
vanity:

“Take the
back off the watch

and see that
universe of small parts,

bobbing and
turning,

each doing
what it should be doing,

and ignoring
you completely.”

Cole modestly
closes his introduction:

“This
anthology is not trying to prove anything about trends, schools, or movements;
it is simply claiming, `Here are a couple of hundred short, short poems, each
of which has amused, amazed, or excited the compiler.’ To say more would be to
bring suspicion on my praise of brevity. The last word is Alexander Pope’s: